It is easier today to build a website than it was just a few years ago. Not only is building a website easier but the point and click editing and design tools available make creating a professional looking website simple. However, there is one problem most novice website owners eventually encounter that can be the most frustrating part of owning a website: Targeted Organic Traffic.

Once novice website owners complete their website, getting people to view the website is the next obstacle that must be overcome. Simply building a website and uploading it to the host servers will not magically put the new website in front of the millions of people that surf the Internet everyday. New websites must be optimized in order to receive traffic and in order to get this traffic new website owners must implement proper Search Engine Optimization.

The search engine optimization process begins even before the website is built and designed. Before a website is built, a target market or niche must be chosen and this target market is what the website will be built around. New website builders must first determine the market, then do keyword research to locate the search words for the market that people are placing in the search engines that relate to the website theme.

Keyword research is such an important part of the website building process that if overlooked or not properly done, could make the whole website building process in vain. People that are building their first website are usually excited about their new endeavor and quickly become disillusioned once they realize that there website is receiving little or no traffic.

Search engine optimization is a process that must be learned and is also dynamic and ever changing. What works today may not work three months from now because search engines like Google are always tweaking and changing their algorithms for two very important reasons:

The first reason is to deliver a better product. Google is the behemoth of all search engines with the lion share of searches done on the Internet each day, leaving Yahoo and MSN in their wake. Since Google is the market leader, they pride themselves on delivering the most up to date and relevant information being delivered to their users.

The first reason Google constantly tweaks their algorithms leads to the second reason: Because Google is the market leader among search engines, scammers, spammers and black hats constantly try to game the Google system to reach the top slots on Google to exploit the massive amount of traffic that Google produces each day.

This is why search engine optimization is such a difficult part of the website experience for the novice. Search engine optimization is better learned by trial and error rather than taught as theory in the classroom since SEO is an ever changing process. Utilizing the services of a reputable SEO firm is the best avenue for novice website builders that do not have the time to learn the ropes of SEO. However, it should be noted that proper SEO techniques are not exclusive to SEO firms. On the contrary, SEO concepts and techniques can be learned by anyone that has the time and discipline to do so.


About the Author

Doug Fisher writes about search engine optimization and various other subjects. Please visit his search engine marketing Memphis, SEO blog for more information.

Labels: google, search engines, seo, traffic, web design

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Search engines, where would we be without them? Within the past 10-15 years the internet has become a huge part of every day American life. Many people nowadays cannot remember the time prior to having this wonderful information highway we call the internet. The internet has really revolutionized the way people live their lives; for example, you can bank online, buy just about anything you want online, meet new people online, and even find local movie times. However, one of the biggest benefits of the internet is the use of search engines. At any moment in time you may have a question, or an urge to get more information about a certain topic and that information can be easily attained through a search engine. In this article I am going to give you a brief history on the evolution of the search engine, and show you how they truly have revolutionized our lifestyles.

The history of search engines is the story of university students' projects evolving into commercial enterprises and revolutionizing the field as they went. The first attempt at creating a search engine was called Archie, and it was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University. This very primitive search engine did not use any robot technology. All Archie really did was just become a database of archived file names, which it would try to match with users' queries.

The next evolutionary step of the search engine was the introduction of "robots." The first use of robot technology was in the search engine World Wide Web Wanderer. Simply what robots would do is scan the internet for URL's, starting at one site and using the links in the previous site to find more sites. The problems with these first robots were that if they were not written properly they would cause too many hits on a server decaying the systems performance.

To combat these initial problems Martjin Koster came out with the first web directory called "Aliweb" in October 1993. Web directories are different than search engines because the sites listed in them are not from automated robots, but rather from human editors reviewing sites and placing them in the directory.

However, shortly after, in December 1993, a new robot was born. This was called the "spider." Spiders added a much further degree of accuracy by indexing the entire text of a webpage. The older robots only indexed the URL and titles of a page, which meant that some pertinent keywords might not be indexed. This greatly improved the relevancy rankings of their results, and thus was the first major step in forming the major search engines that we have all become so used to using today.

Not long after the spider, we saw the emergence of some of the big guns. In 1994, out of Stanford University came the extremely famous Yahoo. The two guys who started Yahoo were students, David Filo and JerryYang. Basically, at first Yahoo was just a list of these guys' favorite websites. But soon, due to its easy user-friendly interface, became the most popular web directory. Due to the fact that its websites were all human reviewed, Yahoo was only able to index about 1% of the web. At this time, Altavista became the fastest growing search engines using the spider technology and was indexing up to 10 million pages a day.

By this time there are two different types of search engines, "author controlled" such as Altavista and Excite, in which results were ranked by keyword relevancy, and "editor controlled" such as Yahoo, in which humans manually placed websites into their index.
Then in late 1997 out of Stanford University was born the most popular and well-known search engine to date: GOOGLE Google has a different way of ranking its websites. It used a Pagerank system. Simply what they did was list websites higher in their results based on how many links were pointing to a particular site. Of course, the content on the page had to be relevant to the keyword typed into the search box. But basically, Google invented what you could call a system of voting. So a site with numerous backlinks or votes would rank higher. A backlink is just when someone else puts a link on their site that points to another outside site. Jump forward to today and Google has more than 80% of the websites on the internet in their index, which is pretty impressive.

Search engines have had a huge impact on the American lifestyle. They basically will grant you just about any information you want, all you have to do is type into the search box the topic you want to find more information about. Human beings are natural born information junkies, we always want to know more and find out more and search engines have made this urge of ours extremely easy to cure. Just think about it, maybe you need to fix a simple problem you have with your car. By using a search engine to do some research you may very easily figure the problem out, saving you a very costly trip to the car repair shop. They are just great educational tools, before search engines emerged if you really wanted to learn something you would go to your library and check out a book. Now before making that trip you may find out what you wanted by just sitting at your desktop and surfing through Google. The list goes on about the many benefits of this great new technology we call the search engine. I'm sure you can recall a time when you found some very good information by using one. If you're anything like me and find yourself addicted to this easily accessible information highway then your making uses of them daily.

Search engines by nature were made very easy to use. However, with a little extra knowledge about how they work you can really take advantage of them and find great information very quickly. With the right knowledge of search engines and the use of specialized tools you can literally find anything you want. And when I mean anything, I mean ANYTHING. For me personally I am excited to see what search engines will evolve into in the future. The sky is the limit. Who knows what type of search spiders the future will spawn, but one thing is for sure there will be newer and newer search technology it's just our human nature to keep trying to top ourselves.


By: Steve Bis

Author Bio
Search engine specialist Steve Bis, is the author of the free search secrets newsletter and owns a unique web search tool that will help you find anything on the internet in 60 seconds, eliminating your search frustrations.

Labels: history, internet, search engines

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If you have a website you really need to have a robots.txt file. It gives search engine spiders specific commands and it is easy to use and easy to maintain. Here is an easy guide to a robots.txt file in five minutes.

There are times when you don’t want a search engine to index a page or a folder on your website. Maybe you have some information you just don’t want to have show up in google. This may include your statistics page, a page of notes, or a dynamic page. And, importantly, if you use google adsense and the search tool that displays search results on your website google mandates you exclude this page from search engines. Which means they mandate you having a robots.txt file.

A robots.txt file is a simple document named robots.txt and saved in the root folder of your website. Search engines see this and follow any commands it contains. Create a simple text document using any word processor program like notepad and put these two lines it:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

The first line tells all spiders to listen up because the following command is for you. The second line means do not index any of the following pages. And it is here you put the url of any pages you don’t want spidered. So if you wanted the spiders to skip your private page it looks like this:

Disallow:/privatepage.htm

If you want the spiders to skip a whole folder you put the url of that folder with a slash like this:

Disallow:/privatefolder/

Simply place this text file in the root folder of your website and you are done. In the future you can add and remove commands easily.

The robots.txt file is a very easy file to write and maintain and it is a very powerful tool that will help you interact successfully with search engines. This disallow command is the simplest and most used command but there are also many other commands you can use and if you have a website it is well worth your time to have a robots.txt file and even to research it a bit further.

by: Will Kalif

For more interesting insights into being a creative webmaster and making your website work for you visit the authors site at: The Creative Webmaster – Forging the Iron of Creativity on the Anvil of a Website

Labels: index, robots.txt, search engines, seo

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It's pretty safe to say that anyone who has a computer has at some point or another used a search engine. Search engines are extremely useful creatures. They have had a major impact on our society, I mean its pretty amazing that you can just go type in anything you want into a search box and get back information about it in about two seconds. Before search engines came along you pretty much had to rely on going to the library to get more information. With that being said the popularity of search has created quite a huge market. The advent of paid advertising has sprung search engines into a multi-billion dollar a year industry, thus creating some pretty stiff competition. Right now we are in the midst of a major war on the internet, with the major players being Yahoo, MSN, Google, and an upcoming strong contender in Ask. So you may ask who is winning this war right now? And why? And who will take the lead in the future? One thing is for sure the reward of being the king of the search mountain will reap billions and billions of dollars annually.

So what are these top gun search engines competing over? The answer is clicks, on the paid advertisements they present every time someone uses their search engine. If you notice when you use Google for example that at the very top of the page and on the right hand side it says sponsored sites. This is where people trying to make money online pay to advertise for their company. These prices range from nickels and dimes per click, all the way up to hundreds of dollars per click, depending on the keyword. So the main objective for a search engine is to get as many people as possible using them to search the internet. Just think about it for a second, the more searches they get, the more chance of people clicking on their paid ads, which is where they make their money. Now of course not everyone is going to click on the paid ads, only a small percentage of the searches they receive ever actually make the search engine money. However, with millions of searches a day it only takes a small percentage to really make a big monetary difference.

So who are the warlords going to battle here? And who is in the lead? The three major competitors are MSN, Google, and Yahoo, and Ask is fighting its way back into the mix of things with some pretty sweet search features.

As of right now Google is in the lead, they receive somewhere in the ballpark of 80% of all search queries on the internet. Google is estimated to gross around 3 billion dollars in 2006, all from just paid advertisement. Now you may ask why is it that Google is so far ahead? Well there are a few reasons. First, Google has the most advanced algorithm, which is the mind boggling mathematical equation that ranks and lists sites depending on the keyword. Trying to understand their algorithm is extremely complicated, Google only hires absolute geniuses to work for them. Second, is the brilliance of Google.com itself, which is their homepage.

Take a look at Google's homepage, all you can do is type your keyword in the search box and hit search. There's really nothing else going on it's pretty clean cut and user friendly, with absolutely no distractions from getting people to do what they want. Which is search

Now take a look at MSN, or Yahoo's homepage. It is just jam packed with all sorts of stuff to do from playing games to reading articles about the news. This stuff is great and all, however it does distract people from typing into the search box and inevitably clicking on a paid ad putting money in their pocket. I believe this is a major part in why Google has such a gigantic lead in the volume of searches they receive compared to the other top guns. .

So I firmly believe that in this case the giant will not be taken down. Even though you see commercials for Yahoo and Ask, you know the ones with the cheesy guy screaming Yahoooo and the monkey that Ask is featuring. The bottom line is Google has the best algorithm right now and their site doesn't distract people from searching, which will yield many more search queries. Who knows though just as Google basically came from no where and took over the market, there may be a new kid on the block that will topple them. However as of now though they are the reigning champions.

Author Bio
Search engine specialist Steve Bis, is the author of the free search secrets newsletter and owns a unique web search tool that will help you find anything on the internet in 60 seconds, eliminating your search frustrations.

Labels: ask, google, msn, search engines, yahoo

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Inbound Links are the life blood of a website and the Pathway to Success revolves around these links. In a broad sense these inbound links can be categorized under three groups, Good, Bad and Useless Links. The good links can indeed sky-rocket your website up the popularity ladder to fame and fortune while on the other hand the bad Links can dump your website out of sight in the internet. The useless Links will be of no help or value to you. So it stands to reason that you cultivate good links if you want to be successful in your online business.

Useful Good Inbound Links:

These links will bring enormous benefits to your website. They can increase your search engine visibility which will indicate the popularity of your site thus increasing your link popularity, page rank, traffic and sales.

If you have unique and useful content in your site other websites will link to your site to provide their website visitors a good website experience. This will give you useful inbound links and valuable targeted traffic.

Listing your website in both paid and free high ranking web directories can give good one way inbound links. Some free directories might insist on reciprocal linking but this should not be of concern to you as they are all useful links.

Writing quality authoritative articles and submitting them to article directories and article distributors with your website URL in the resource box is a smart way of obtaining one way links. This will soon grow viral as webmasters publish them in their articles and ezines bringing you hundreds or even thousands of valuable one way links.

Search Engines do not devalue all reciprocal links. They do appreciate quality, theme related reciprocal links. In addition it will be a great bonus if you can identify sites that the search engines consider as authority sites in the same theme as your site and exchange links with them.

Social Book marking is becoming increasingly popular day by day. Here you can maintain a personal collection of links online and also allow access to any others online. Linking your site or articles to popular social sites is another great way of obtaining useful good links and traffic.

Bad Inbound Links:

These are inbound links that are disliked by search engines especially Google and can do enormous harm to your website. By linking to these websites knowingly or unknowingly, you can be penalized or blacklisted by the search engines.

Avoid linking to sites search engines consider as Link Farms. These are sites that have hundreds of assorted links linking to each other in a page. By linking to them your credibility will be at stake and probably be penalized by the search engines.

Search Engines disapprove Free For All sites also known as FFA sites. Here you can place an advertisement with your link in it. Your advertisement will appear along with thousands of others and would probably get an exposure of an hour or so. It is wise to keep away from these sites.

You should also avoid Bad Neighborhoods because these are websites that have been penalized or banned by the search engines. By linking to them you too risk being penalized by the search engines.

Useless Inbound Links:

Some inbound links are neither good nor bad. They are in fact useless and of no benefit to you. You should avoid linking to sites that are irrelevant to the theme of your website even if they are of high page rank. Search Engines are not going to give any credit for this and you will hardly get any targeted traffic from them either.

Similarly linking to websites with very low PR even if they are of the same theme will not be of immediate benefit.

Conclusion:

Ultimately the secret of your success will depend on the inbound links you obtain from useful good websites and ignoring all the others. The obvious results will be increase in link popularity, good search engine placement and great traffic.

Copyright © 2008 Kanaga Siva.

Kanaga Siva is an experienced Author and Marketer. For more Tips and a useful Internet Marketing experience you are welcome to visit his Free Home Based Business Website and Blog.

Labels: back links, link building, search engines, seo

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The success of a search engine optimization campaign depends largely on the number of back-links from other websites. Websites are windows to the products and services that you offer. It is hence important that your website ranks high on search engines in order to increase sales.

Statistics show that over 70% visitors to a website come from search engines. There is little doubt now a days that search engine ranking is important for a business to succeed in today's internet driven economy.

There are approximately 40 million websites online today and only a handful can appear on the first few pages of search engines. The number of other websites that link to a website is the most important factor that decides which website appears on the first page of a search engine when a search is performed. Why is it important for other websites to link to your website? Search engines treat links to your website as a sort of a voting system. The more the sites that link to you the higher the vote your website gets. When another website links to your website it adds authority to your website. It is one of the most important factors for coming on top of search engines. Google uses its own set of rules called page rank to determine the importance of a website on its searches. There are about 5 million variables that decide which website appears on search results of a search engine. Links to your website is the most important of them all. In order for a business to maximise the benefits of the internet, It is important to have an ongoing search engine marketing strategy that focuses on getting related websites linking back to yours. An effective search engine optimization campaign should identify other related websites to get back-links from.

www.kronikmedia.co.uk/blog

Labels: back links, links, search engines, seo

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There are several techniques in SEO which every webmaster should know in order to achieve higher search engine rankings for the website. The more you come to know about these techniques, the better will be the performance of your web pages in search engines.

As SEO is the real way to attract traffic to your website, so it is very important that you understand the basic tricks involved in higher search engine rankings. Some of good seo tricks and techniques are:

The title tag is one of the most useful SEO Services technique that should be used with creativeness. Place the exact keyword used for the webpage in the title tag.

Link popularity is the other major aim of SEO Services . Generally most search engines do not like those websites that do not have links pointing to them. This will not only increase the traffic but also provide good rankings and enhance value of your website.

It is essential for all webmasters to have basic understanding of all simple SEO Techniques in order to have the top search engine rankings for their website. The more you know about search engine optimization techniques the better your web pages will be in google.

Keyword density is an important aspect of SEO and it should be properly researched. The keywords should be used only once in the title tag, heading and body text.

Use different title on each of web page with its own primary keywords at the beginning of page title. Get your keywords in much of the anchor text of both internal and external links.

While offering SEO Services it is essential to make a website that is rich in theme because search engines are more interested in themes. Built the content that is related to your website and that is minimum of 250 words per page because the speed of your web page indicates a lot to your visitors and search engines. Always add unique and fresh content on the regular basis that attracts visitors to come back to your website.

Always remember to add sitemap to structure your website for spiders.

Submit article to article directories with link to your sites. Find forums related to your niche. Join these forums, actively participate in it and advertise your website there according to the rules and regulations of these forums.

Submit your website to the good directories.

These techniques listed above can really help you to optimize your website in search engine results and enhance the search engine rankings. But it is necessary for you to follow them regularly.

About the Author

Rajeev Guglani writes articles for SEO.He has vast exposure in writing for Web Promotions.He is working for NDDW. For Website Promotion ,Internet Marketing , SEO Services India visit www.nddw.com

Labels: keywords, links, search engines, seo, techniques

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